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I haven't really followed the news. This is a surprising claim, but I admit I haven't checked up on it. Are their chips actually that competitive with a maxed o

I haven't really followed the news. This is a surprising claim, but I admit I haven't checked up on it. Are their chips actually that competitive with a maxed out Intel quad core macbooks? It took a long time to get fully swapped from x86 to ARM. In the scheme of things Intel chips seem like such a marginal cost to Apple, why bother changing?

robin_reala 9y ago
There was a flurry of news articles a couple of days ago reporting that the A11 was on par with the most powerful dual-core Intel chips Apple is currently using: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/13/a11-bionic-chip-geekbench-scores/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/13/a11-bionic-chip-geekben...
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  geekbench is the only thing showing these outsized results, id be very suspicious of geekbench
  - hoschicz 9y ago
    What other cross-platform benchmark do you suggest? People are comparing it in Geekbench because it is the only big benchmark that is available on both platforms.
    - throwaway2048 9y ago
      snythetic benchmarks are notorious for being unrelistic and unreliable. just because there isnt an alternative dosent mean that geekbench is accurate, id be pretty skeptical of claims that arm chips with a fraction of the transistors and power budget are somehow magically just as fast as big full fat x86 chips.
      - robin_reala 9y ago
        Power delivery, sure, but you’re off on transistor count. Wikipedia list a ‘Dual-core + GPU Iris Core i7 Broadwell-U’ as 1.9B transistors [1], and the A11 is 4.3B. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
        throwaway2048 9y ago
        Should be noted the A11 is 6cores+gpu and the i7u is 2 cores + GPU. And we are talking about per core preformance.
      - Dylan16807 9y ago
        Current x86 chips are spending huge amounts of their transistor and power budget on tiny increases in instructions per clock. When you have twice as many cores to play with then you can have better total performance with a lot less resource cost.
    - imtringued 9y ago
      SPEC CPU 2017 or 2006 https://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#cpu https://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#cpu Here is an article that uses it: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-revie... (Scroll down to the last table)

robin_reala 9y ago

There was a flurry of news articles a couple of days ago reporting that the A11 was on par with the most powerful dual-core Intel chips Apple is currently using: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/13/a11-bionic-chip-geekbench-scores/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/13/a11-bionic-chip-geekben...

throwaway2048 9y ago
geekbench is the only thing showing these outsized results, id be very suspicious of geekbench
- hoschicz 9y ago
  What other cross-platform benchmark do you suggest? People are comparing it in Geekbench because it is the only big benchmark that is available on both platforms.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    snythetic benchmarks are notorious for being unrelistic and unreliable. just because there isnt an alternative dosent mean that geekbench is accurate, id be pretty skeptical of claims that arm chips with a fraction of the transistors and power budget are somehow magically just as fast as big full fat x86 chips.
    - robin_reala 9y ago
      Power delivery, sure, but you’re off on transistor count. Wikipedia list a ‘Dual-core + GPU Iris Core i7 Broadwell-U’ as 1.9B transistors [1], and the A11 is 4.3B. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
      - throwaway2048 9y ago
        Should be noted the A11 is 6cores+gpu and the i7u is 2 cores + GPU. And we are talking about per core preformance.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      Current x86 chips are spending huge amounts of their transistor and power budget on tiny increases in instructions per clock. When you have twice as many cores to play with then you can have better total performance with a lot less resource cost.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    SPEC CPU 2017 or 2006 https://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#cpu https://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#cpu Here is an article that uses it: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-revie... (Scroll down to the last table)